Here's
my short review: The game is great. If you own an iOS device, or if
you have occasional access to one, buy it.

Here
comes my longer review.

In
The Sinister Fairground you take the role of a young man who unwisely
chooses to meet his girlfriend Sophia in the diabolical Fairground of
the Extraordinary. You quickly realise that the fairground's
dastardly denizens have stolen Sophia away, and that you'll have to
search through an array of macabre attractions if you ever hope to
see her again. It's grisly, horror-themed hi-jinks - though you'll
also come across a fair amount of self-conscious, genre-savvy comedy
as the game pokes good-natured fun at various horror and fantasy
tropes, and even the medium of gamebooks themselves.

There's
a lot of good stuff here. The in-game map features 11 main areas to
explore - such as the 'Circus of Monsters' or the 'Hall of Mirrors' -
and a handful of other mini-areas besides. And there's a ton of
content in each one. You won't see everything in a single
playthrough. Some encounters and enemies are played for laughs.
Others are genuinely eerie. Personally, my most chilling in-game
experience so far has been sharing a car with a Portuguese serial
killer - though, curiously, this Dexter-esque foe didn't try to harm
me in any way (on this particular playthrough, at least - I'm sure I
could have easily attracted his ire if I'd been more careless). Each
area is essentially independent of the others, though there's some
crossover in the clues and items you can pick up that can prove
useful elsewhere. You also get a few Easter eggs sprinkled about the
game (one of them even gives a shout out to fellow gamebook app
developers Tin Man and Inkle).

Cubus
has developed a lovely game engine. It's pretty, and it's easy to
use. I'm not a huge fan of virtual dice rolling around the screen of
your device (Grr...), and a lot of dice-rolling - or rather,
dice-spinning - does take place here. But that's not so frustrating,
as the game allows you to amass 'Hero Points' that can be used to
reroll or even automatically pass failed tests. Similarly, combat is
dependent on rolling to hit your enemy (Grr...), and rolling to see
if your enemy hits you (Grr...) - but there is also a tactical
element, in that you have to choose which weapon to use (Chainsaw?
Katana? Magnum 44?) and whether you want to use various one-off items
or spells to help you, from round to round.

And,
best of all, IF YOU GET KILLED YOU DON'T HAVE TO START AGAIN FROM THE
BEGINNING. I love this feature. Instead, the game boots you out of
the current area, and pretends that the last few encounters never
took place. Brilliant. It's so much more fun to play when you don't
have that ever-present risk of total failure hanging over you.

Another
great feature - you can use your Hero Points to automatically beat
any really nasty enemies. Even big, plot-important foes. It's a sort
of 'cheat-if-you-want-to-without-feeling-bad-about-it' mechanism, and
it's inspired.

The
game isn't perfect. There are a few weak spots. They aren't biggies,
but they include: -

The story is sometimes flimsy. For instance, you never get much
information about Sophia, your girlfriend. Why do you like her? How
did the two of you meet? What sort of personality does she have?

I'm disappointed there's no option to play as a girl, or as a gay or
bisexual character. I know that coding a lot of different variables
like this takes more work, but I'd have liked to see something a
little more progressive.

In the English-language version of the game, there are occasional
proofreading problems - typos, misused words, clumsy-sounding
sentences. But none of this is serious. It doesn't disrupt the flow
of the game.

A personal bugbear: I dislike inventory management. Yes, it's more
realistic and it increases the game's challenge. I just find it a
pain in the backside. Here, you're limited to carrying five weapons
and ten objects.

So,
overall verdict: I refer you back to my short review above. The game
is excellent. Cubus have really done well with this one, and I
absolutely recommend it. At the time of writing, their second game -
Heavy Metal Thunder, by Kyle B. Stiff - is due for imminent release.
And I'm really looking forward to seeing what they do with it. Even though it might not have as many scary ghosts.